


Love always wins

by NefertitiJones



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 07:48:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21370666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NefertitiJones/pseuds/NefertitiJones
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Love always wins

“Quentin… is dead.”

Eliot does not quite know what to do with those words. They enter in through his ears and swirl around for a little while, looking for somewhere to settle. His brain regards them warily while it waits for them to shift into something else. Something less impossible.

“Eliot..?” Margo’s voice is tentative, but it is her tightened grip on his wrist that brings him back to the room. Her fingernails bite his skin.

“I’m sorry,” he says, too brightly, and looks straight into her eyes. “I honestly thought you said that Quentin...” He cannot bring himself to complete the sentence.

Margo looks back at him. Her lips move to form words, but Eliot is merciful and he breaks the gaze.

“Oh.” His voice catches as his throat thickens and the tears come. The words find their place to settle: there, at the dark heart of him, next to the peaches and the plums and the regret and the fear and that glorious, hazy Fillory light that always made him feel a little drunk. That is where they make their inevitable home.

“Quentin is dead.” He sounds the words out; tries them on for size. They do not fit. They will never fit.

***

“So needless to say I’m odds and ends -”

He’s singing. It’s Eliot’s own voice, clear and high and true - but broken in some fundamental way that even he doesn’t quite recognise yet. 

“But that’s me stumbling away,” Margo joins him, their voices tangling together in the way that their lives always have. “Slowly learning that life is okay.”

He hunches next to Alice on the tree stump, trying to protect himself from the pain in his gut; the pain in his heart.

It’s not okay, his inner voice says. But the lyrics don’t let him have that. The spell wants him to hope.

Alice offers out her hand. Tentatively, like someone coming round from a confusing dream, Eliot takes it. Twines his cold fingers with hers and stares down into the fire while the music ripples around them.

The peach in his pocket smells like heaven, and when the time comes he slips his hand from Alice’s and cradles the fruit gently, like it’s the most precious thing on Earth. Eliot lifts it to his nose, to his lips, drinks in the scent and the feel of it as though it were Quentin himself.

He almost takes a bite. Peaches and plums, motherfucker. Peaches and plums. And he’s back in Fillory, sitting under Margo’s ruined wedding arch with Quentin beside him. The memories of the beauty of all life - of their life together, their family, both the good and the bad of it - flood through him, passing so fleetingly that he gasps. But the music drives things on, and the peach rolls from his fingers and into the fire.

“Shying away.” Eliot’s falsetto cuts into the moment, and he feels so exposed by that ugly truth that he barely registers the rejoinder offered by the others. Margo’s voice, and Julia’s and Alice’s - all of them harmonising in response to him and him alone.

“I’ll be coming for you anyway.”

The music propels them, voices melding, but Eliot soars off into lonely descant.

“I’ll be gone in a day or two.”


End file.
